Thoughts from a Part-Core Gamer

Liberated’s Goings On

What an awful looking title. However, it’s perfectly accurate. Today, I’d like to discuss my Death Knight, Liberated, and how he’s been progressing recently.

You may remember that I intend to level Liberated almost entirely in dungeons. I haven’t made a ton of progress yet (more on that in a moment), but things are speeding up. I gave him a lot of time the past week or so because my wife’s been out of town and my buddy is incessantly watching basketball games, so mostly I’ve fallen back on my “solo” gaming choice.

I mentioned before that early tanking without the “signature” DK abilities was weird, but it’s gotten easier and easier. At this point, after I get the healer’s permission, the dungeon is just a single long pull. I can easily tank 4 or 5 groups while the healer keeps me alive. When things get sticky (such as in some of the Auchindoun instances when you can be feared, disoriented (which acts as a temporary threat reset), and stunned back to back), I can easily heal myself with my four handy cooldowns. I suspect I could survive an equal-level boss fight without a healer as long as the dps were there to speed the kill up. Luckily, I haven’t had to find out.

At this point, it’s all just blood boils and death strikes. It’s absurd how easy tanking has become. As a consequence, I’ve had a lot of good conversations with the decent players I’ve met in LFD, which in and of itself is a nice change. I’ve only bumped into one “gogogo” jerk, and even he wasn’t much of a problem. I told him I pulled according to the healer’s wishes, not his. He responded quite rudely, so I stopped and prepared to vote to kick. In the meantime, though, the healer said chain pulling was fine (why he didn’t respond when I asked earlier I don’t know, but he hadn’t), so I began to chain pull and the situation resolved itself. Hooray for vanishing problems!

The reason I’m not already 70 or higher was because I decided to go ahead and go back to catch up on my professions. I’ve leveled a DK before, Darthfarb. However, I mostly leveled him through questing, not dungeons, so that in and of itself is a little different. To further mix it up, I decided instead of going double gathering (my usual “first characters” profession strategy), I’d do inscription, the only profession I’ve never dabbled with. I’ve found it both incredibly cheap and easy to level (compared to, say, engineering) as well as quite profitable. I did hit a stop at one point where I had trained all my gold reserves away and didn’t have enough money to continue with future recipes. I logged out for the day and pursued other interests. The next day, when I checked back in, I’d made about 300g on selling my previous day’s glyphs. Lovely!

I did have one weird encounter where a stranger /w’d me to ask why I undercut people by several gold (I usually undercut about 20-25%) instead of one copper. He explained that it “ruined the market” and I was “hurting myself and other scribes” (his writing was far less grammatical, for the record). I simply told him that I made plenty of money, so I wasn’t hurting myself, and invited him to buy my “cheap” glyphs up and resell them at his prices.

He did not respond.

At any rate, it’s been pretty smooth sailing and a good amount of “fun,” and I look forward to continuing it.

And as a bonus, here’s one more “out of place” banner that were mentioned to me by a commentator. Enjoy!

As the battle for Hyjal raged, Jaina knew the extra time she’d taken to decorate the alliance tower would really pay off. Courtesy of Shintar – Thanks!